Recently Mentioned Books

John Fabian Witt, American Contagions: Epidemics and the Law from Smallpox to Covid-19 is a short but useful treatment of what its title promises.  I had not known that both Frederick Douglass and Malcolm X were opposed to compulsory vaccination.

There is Judith Flanders, A Place for Everything: The Curious History of Alphabetical Order .

5. Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology .  From the 1830s, this remains one of the great scientific classics.  I had never known how well-reasoned or beautifully written it was, a big positive surprise for me.  Not just a bunch of crusty old rocks, though it is also about…a bunch of crusty old rocks.

4. Charles Camic, Veblen: The Making of an Economist Who Unmade Economics .  It makes sense that a biography of Veblen should be…somewhat verbose.  Nonetheless this is a valuable contribution for anyone interested in the topic.  To me the main question is why the libertarian right takes Veblen more seriously these days than does the Left, perhaps it is because they read Veblen and immediately think of Wokeism?

2. Terryl Givens, Mormonism: What Everyone Needs to Know .  Perhaps if one needs to read this book, one is also under-qualified to comment on it.  Still it seemed very good to me and providing one of the better introductions.  I hadn’t know for instance that Abraham and even Adam to some extent were “in on” the covenant all along.

1. Gregory M. Collins, Commerce and Manners in Edmund Burke’s Political Economy .  Burke is underrated as an economist, and also more generally.  This very thorough and thoughtful book goes a long way toward setting the record straight.  In the meantime, it is not sufficiently well known just how much Keynes was influenced by Burke.

Darmon Richter, Chernobyl: A Stalker’s Guide .

Joe Henrich, The WEIRDEST People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous .

Steven Levy, Facebook: The Inside Story .

Bruno Macaes, History has Begun: The Birth of a New America .

Garett Jones, 10% Less Democracy: Why You Should Trust the Elites a Little More and the Masses a Little Less .

Anton Howes, Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation .

1. Anton Howes for his Substack Age of Invention .  He is a historian of invention, often but not exclusively focusing on the eighteenth century, here is Anton on Twitter .  As a separate matter, don’t forget Anton’s excellent recent book Arts & Minds: How the Royal Society of Arts Changed a Nation .

Recommended, you can order here .

5. Slavoj Žižek , Hegel in a Wired Brain .  How do transhumanism, Elon Musk/Neuralink, the Singularity, Book of Genesis, and Hegel all fit together?  There is only one person who could pull off such a book, noting this version is dense and not for the uninitiated.  Here is one squib: “Police is closer to civil society than state; it is a kind of representative of state in civil society, but for this very reason it has to be experienced as an external force, not an inner ethical power.”  If you t...

4. Ronald Bailey and Marian L. Tupy, Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know .  Lovely visuals, blurb from Pinker, the curves slope upward, get the picture?  Let’s hope they’re right!  Ultimately I find this kind of exercise less convincing than I used to, instead preferring a broader theory that also accounts for what I perceive to be a growing disorientation.  Which brings us to the next title…

3. Hermione Lee, Tom Stoppard: A Life .  So many pages, and perhaps this will not be surpassed soon.  Yet it never quite tells you how he got to be so smart, or how his intellectual development proceeded, or even what his smartness consists of.  So I can’t say I liked it.  By the way, for those of you who don’t know, it seems to me that Stoppard is one of the smartest people and also the most important living playwright, most of all for anyone interested in intellectual history.

2. Robert Townsend, Distributed Ledgers: Design and Regulation of Financial Infrastructure and Payment Systems . Bitcoin and crypto yes, but the more fundamental concept in this book is…distributed ledgers, which include Thai rice allocation schemes and Mesopotamia circa 4000 B.C.  It is highly intelligent and well done, but somehow I think books like this work better when they are more speculative and future-oriented.

1. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climactic Regime .  Mostly not about climate per se, rather how we are failing at being true materialists: “In a sense, Trump’s election confirms, for the rest of the world, the end of a politics oriented toward an identifiable goal.  Trumpian politics is not “post-truth,” it is post-politics — that is, literally, a politics with no object , since it rejects the world that it claims to inhabit.”  Mostly interesting, as one expects from Latour, ...

You can pre-order here .  Here is Virginia’s adapted WSJ essay .

Jason Brennan, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia .  My blurb said “The one book to read about trying to become a professor.”

Adam Thierer, Evasive Entrepreneurs & the Future of Governance: How Innovation Improves Economies and Governments , extends the important idea of permissionless innovation.

4. Les Payne and Tamara Payne, The Dead Are Arising: the Life of Malcolm X .  I pawed through this book, and it gave off signals of being high quality.  But somehow reading it didn’t hold my interest.  I then googled to a few reviews, but I rapidly realized (again) that such reviews are these days untrustworthy.  Try this NYT review , starting with this sentence: “Les Payne’s “The Dead Are Arising” arrives in late 2020, bequeathed to an America choked by racism and lawlessness.”  The reviewer ma...

3. Donald W. Braben, Scientific Freedom: The Elixir of Civilization , Stripe Press reprint.  Here is the book’s home page .

2. Tobias S. Harris, The Iconoclast: Shinzo Abe and the New Japan (UK Amazon listing, I paid the shipping charge, here is the U.S. listing ). Yes a good biography of Abe, but most of all a book to make Japanese politics seem normal, rather than something connected to a country with a Kakuhidou movement .